We need a new front page (again)

Back in July last year I blogged about our new front page for Student Development. At the time Alan made this comment...

I understand the problem, but it's a bit busy for my liking - too much text to scan, too many distractions. [...] If it were me, I'd go for less, but allow people to drill down easily. Sorry, I know you worked hard on this [...]

I think Alan was right (you can see the current page here) but I didn't want to change it again so soon after coming up with the redesign (not least because it was a big improvement on the previous version and that was the main thing at that point). My response at the time was that I'd let it run for a while and then revisit it - well now we have chance to revisit it, not least because of the renaming thing. I've had a look at a number of other similar services at other institutions including Manchester, Warwick, Lancaster and Durham, and as you will see if you click on the links they all use a similar structure at the top level, i.e. students, employers and staff - which I think is spot on. So that was what I discussed with Matt a couple of weeks ago and this is what he's come up with, which I think is great (he's blogged about it here)!

This is only a first draft though and I'd be really interested in your comments. We can use portlets on the left or right hand side to include contact details and news items but the main part of the screen is what you see above. The 'What's hot' bit we can update on a frequent basis (not sure about the name but you get the idea). The 'Follow us' links can link to the individual accounts or pages with multiple accounts listed (for instance - I might set up a Twitter account solely for jobs and internships advertising in addition to our current one). We also need to think about what we do with the next level down: Students and Alumni can link to a page which is broken up into succeed in your studies, gain experience and develop your career; the Employer section can link to our Employer Liaison pages (we'll be revamping these shortly); and the staff section can link to what is currently a very embryonic staff folder (I'll need to develop this pretty quickly). I'd also appreciate suggestions of what I could replace the nasty banner image with (see below - I've never liked it but changing it hasn't been a priority up to this point), maybe something a bit like the Environment Team's (not the fridge magnet idea but the separate images idea).

One concern I have is that, other than the 'What's hot' box, we've used the whole of the centre of the page for static items. Is that ok or should we put a dynamic news feed in? It looks quite fresh now but it could quickly feel dated if it remains relatively static.

I should also probably run all this by my colleagues in Marketing to check they're happy (note to self).

All suggestions gratefully received :)